As many of you are probably aware Dell launched Project Sputnik which is a short 6-month pet project in which Dell will take a crack at making a laptop for developers specifically those who develop Free Open Source Software.

While at UDS-Q in Oakland, CA I witnessed the awarding of three Dell XPS 13 Ultrabooks to some amazing Juju Charm authors and I also got to hold and have a look at one of the devices and one thing that I found interesting was Dell went ahead and left the Windows logo on the bottom panel of the devices they were giving away to developers and mind you the device runs Ubuntu 12.04.

Project Sputnik - Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook

I realize it is a great thing that Dell is investing money and time into developing a device that runs Ubuntu and is geared towards developers but in my mind Dell could have very easily replaced the panels before handing them off to people who work with Free Open Source Software instead of leaving the brand on the devices.

Anyways kudos to Dell for yet again giving Ubuntu a try again and hopefully we will see Dell expand their offerings to include Ubuntu laptops in the mainstream marketplace but until then there are nice vendors like System76 and ZaReason who are soaking up money from Ubuntu Users and I’m personally looking forward to CTL’s launch of a Ultrabook competitor product running Ubuntu in the near future.

A Follow-up post is available here since this post has become viral and controversial some how

Linux Boot Denied Due To UEFI

As I was preparing to head out to the Ubuntu Oregon Ocelot 11.10 Release Party the other night I received a e-mail from a LoCo member in Salem, Oregon who passed on this message and felt it was an important matter to begin discussing:

Recent articles regarding UEFI and Windows 8 suggest the problem of the former blocking Linux bootloader installation is a matter that will appear at the introduction of the latter. That is not the case. It is on Win 7 machines and blocking GRUB installation now.

My friend recently got an HP s5-1110 with Win 7 installed. UEFI has prevented the installation of GRUB on this machine. I could find no way in the BIOS to disable the feature and so far, as I work my way up the HP tech support ladder, I have found no HP techs who have a clue what I’m talking about.

Just a heads up and a possible topic for discussion at the party. Of course, if anyone has more information on this issue, I’d be glad to hear from you.

The next morning I began looking into UEFI more since I had not done a lot of research but did know it was discovered around the time Windows 8 Developer was released. Anyways Ubuntu has a Community Documentation Article that discusses some workarounds for the UEFI problem and I have personally been considering how greatly the UEFI problem could affect Linux Users. I think there is some positive discussion going on and brainstorming occurring that will allow the Linux community to find reliable workarounds and solutions before UEFI becomes a standard.

Apparently Dell has had UEFI laptops for a while so it is no surprise that a new HP laptop has UEFI by default although with HP doing quite a bit of stuff in the FOSS community I figured they might have provided better support for someone trying to install Linux. Hopefully some sort of legislation will pass that requires manufacturers to list that a certain device is only capable of running a certain OS out of the box and further the whole issue seems very anti-competitive.

Update on Situation as of 4:37 PM Today:

Disturbingly, there were no error messages at all. Neither the Kubuntu installer nor the Boot Repair disk I subsequently tried gave any indication of failure, but the boot partition remained untouched. (I found the Boot Repair disk recommended on the Ubuntu wiki. It is a nice GUI which calls various command line utilities to produce reports on the disk and, of course, grub-install to actually install the bootloader. I must assume that it is, ultimately, grub-install which is failing silently.) The BIOS did have an entry for UEFI, but choosing it produced no response at all.

At this point I have found no firmware updates for the system nor anyone at HP who even knows what UEFI is, much less if there is a way around it.